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Wednesday, May 9, 2012

McLeod's Bookstore, Basement Edition.

Here is McLeod's Bookshop again - the biggest firetrap in
Vancouver, literary edition. It is the
most bookish bookstore I've ever been into, and comes complete with a
crotchety bookstore-keeper, who sits behind an old wooden desk in the center of
the maze on the upper floor and snarls when you ask for a price-check or worse,
and cheekily, approach him with a title search. There's something
about a really bookish used bookstore that inspires presumptions of magical
powers in the proprietor. And the worser
and more impenetrable and zoo-ish and Escher-esque the interior of the shop, the harder you
presume an inverse relationship between the crumbling chaos and a level of
arcane omnipotence on his part - of
course he knows the name and location of every single book! In revenge, he will,
entirely fallaciously, direct you to the basement, where the books are stacked
two-and-a-half-thousand to the cubic meter, in dusty towers as tall as you
are. There are handwritten subject catalogues
pinned to pointing to the bottoms of the stacks. The lights are dim and the air is close and
uncomfortably warm. One stray spark off
of the ancient polyester carpet underneath your feet and the whole place would
go up like a bomb. You flee for the
dusty daylight of upstairs, and leave in determination, intending to return
directly with a fire-proof suit and a scuba tank full of sensible ventilation
in case of crisis. You'd gotten almost
lost down there, and in the warren of obscure academic subjects, you'd scarcely
made it past the letter B.

About Me

I am an Australian architect, married to a Canadian who followed me home.
In September 2011 we relocated from rural South Australia to the bustling metropolis of Santiago, Chile, where it's warmer than Canada, but less insect-y than Australia.
How's that for a compromise?